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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#232
Mar 21, 2016 · 43 min
Helping Veterans Learn to Code with David Molina
Military veterans have the right set of skills to become programmers. Technical expertise, emotional resilience, psychological persistence, and teamwork–these are the qualities of the US army and they are the qualities of the best programmers. More and more veterans who leave the army are becoming coders, and the mission of Operation Code is to help veterans make that transition. Dave Molina is the founder of Operation Code. His organization helps army veterans become coders. Dave came on the show to discuss coding boot camps, military, software education, and what it’s like to become a civilian technologist after spending years in the army.
#231
Mar 18, 2016 · 58 min
Building vs. Buying Software with Ayan Barua
Building a software business today requires lots of decision making. Building software isn’t just about choosing a programming language, or a framework, or a database. Developers have to choose the right cloud service provider, the best issue tracking service, the best hosted code repository, the clearest data visualization tools. We need a platform to compare the options between different products, all in one place. In today’s episode, we talk to Ayan Barua from Siftery, a platform for software products and the companies who use them. Siftery’s mission is to help technologists find the best products for their job, whether they are a sysadmin or an advertising account manager. My discussion with Ayan covers the question of build versus buy, how to build a recommender system, and how software will be built in the future; this is also a great episode for anyone who is thinking of how to build a two-sided marketplace business.
#230
Mar 17, 2016 · 46 min
Using Software to Discover Rare Diseases with Matt Might
Software engineering is a deterministic field. We write lines of code, and feed data into that code, expecting to get a certain answer. Computing is deterministic because humans developed it–we understand computers from top to bottom. The same cannot be said about biology. Matt Might is an associate professor with a PhD in computer science. When his son was diagnosed with an extremely rare illness, he was confronted with the uncertainties of human biology. In this episode, we discuss Matt’s quest to solve the puzzle of his son’s disease–computer science meets genetics, on this episode of Software Engineering Daily.
#229
Mar 15, 2016 · 1 hr
The Software Engineering Job Market with Hiten Parmar
In many ways the engineering job market is broken. Engineers cannot find the right jobs where they are valued properly and enjoy their work. Employers have difficulty filling their positions and finding the right people that fit their cultures. Traditional matchmakers like Monster and generic recruiting agencies don’t cut it — you know this by the generic LinkedIn messages you get looking for a Java expert… when you have JavaScript as a skill on your profile. Hired.com is trying to fix this broken process by using a high-touch approach to recruiting. Hiten Parmar, an engineer and product strategist at Hired joins us today to discuss the issues at hand, as well as how Hired is approaching the solution. We chat about the challenges facing engineers, which skills are in demand, and the inner workings of Hired. Full disclosure: Hired is a sponsor of the show, but we would still have done this interview because we genuinely want to discuss the job market, and figure out how companies are addressing this issue.
#228
Mar 15, 2016 · 58 min
State of Programming with Jeff Atwood
Stack Overflow is used by developers to find out how to build software. Stack Overflow is both a tool and a community, and today’s guest Jeff Atwood has made a career out of building tools and communities. As the co-founder of Stack Exchange and Discourse.org, Jeff has been solving the problem of civilized online communication for seven years. In today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, Jeff Atwood talks about building online communities from the perspective of an engineer as well as a sociologist.
#227
Mar 14, 2016 · 56 min
Data Visualization and Mapping with Aurelia Moser
On Software Engineering Daily, we often discuss big data in terms of data engineering and data science. Data engineering is the infrastructure and pipelines that handle massive amounts of data and puts that data in a data lake. With a data infrastructure in place, a data scientist can study the data and take action on it. A data scientist can also create visualizations–which is the subject of today’s episode. Aurelia Moser has a specialty in mapping and data visualization. We discussed how to create effective visualizations of our data, and the tools that can be used to collect and present our data. Whether you work at the New York Times or a small tech company, data visualizations are important, because visualizations can be used to communicate important trends across an organization. Aurelia will also be speaking at the upcoming Strata + Hadoop World Conference in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.
#226
Mar 12, 2016 · 53 min
FiloDB with Evan Chan
Big data is yesterday–fast data is now. FiloDB is a reactive columnar OLAP database that is built on Cassandra and Spark. Today’s guest is Evan Chan, creator of FiloDB. In our discussion today, we talk about the use cases of an OLAP data store. Evan explains how to tackle the problem of video analytics–if you have ever found yourself asking how a company like YouTube or Netflix or Ooyala performs analytics on millions of users watching millions of videos, this episode is for you. By combining the database features of Cassandra with the data processing power of Spark, Evan created FiloDB to help solve this type of analytics problem. Evan will also be presenting at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.
#224
Mar 11, 2016 · 59 min
Cassandra with Tim Berglund
Apache Cassandra can serve as both the real-time data store for online transactional applications, as well as the read-intensive database for data warehousing operations. In order to combine these two use cases into a single database, Apache Cassandra required lots of innovation. In today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily, we discuss the internals of Cassandra. Tim Berglund takes us through how Cassandra performs reads and writes, how Cassandra offers tunable consistency, and what inspirations Cassandra took from the Amazon Dynamo paper as well as the Google BigTable paper. Tim will also be presenting at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.
#222
Mar 10, 2016 · 56 min
Hadoop: Past, Present and Future with Mike Cafarella
Hadoop was created in 2003. In the early years, Hadoop provided large scale data processing with MapReduce, and distributed fault-tolerant storage with the Hadoop Distributed File System. Over the last decade, Hadoop has evolved rapidly, with the support of a big open-source community. Today’s guest is Mike Cafarella, co-creator of Hadoop. Mike takes us on a journey from past to present. Hadoop was based on the Google File System and MapReduce papers, and so Mike and I talk about what it was like to work on a distributed file system in 2004, and the challenges of implementing real software systems based on white papers. We also discuss YARN, and the wave of innovation that YARN enabled within the Hadoop ecosystem. Mike will also be presenting at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.
#220
Mar 9, 2016 · 54 min
Data Engineering at Airbnb with Maxime Beauchemin
When a company gets big enough, there is so much data to be processed that an entire data engineering team becomes responsible for managing this data and making it available to other teams. Airbnb is one such company. Max Beauchemin works on the data engineering team at Airbnb, where he creates infrastructure and tooling for managing data. In this episode of Software Engineering Daily, we talk about AIrflow, a workflow scheduler that assists in job processing. If you don’t know what a workflow is, or a job, we will explain that in this episode. Max and I also talk about Panoramix, a data slicing and visualization tool that helps data scientists and business analysts understand large volumes of data. Max will also be presenting at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.
#218
Mar 8, 2016 · 1 hr
Machine Learning in Healthcare with David Kale
Diagnosing illness today requires the trained eye of a doctor. With machine learning, we might someday be able to diagnose illness using only a data set. Today on Software Engineering Daily, we are joined by David Kale, a researcher at the intersection of machine learning and clinical data. We discuss the machine learning and research techniques he is using to diagnose illnesses using neural networks, and we also talk about the challenges of performing data science in hospitals, where the data is mostly confidential. David will also be presenting at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. We’re partnering with O’Reilly to support this conference – if you want to go to Strata, you can save 20% off a ticket with our code PCSED.
#217
Mar 7, 2016 · 58 min
Open Source and Rails with Aaron Patterson
Ruby on Rails has had the most commits made by its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. The next most frequent contributor to Rails is Aaron Patterson, our guest on today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily. Topics discussed in today’s episode include Ruby relative to JavaScript, Rails relative to Linux, and DHH relative to Tenderlove.
#216
Mar 5, 2016 · 54 min
Software Journalism at GeekWire with Todd Bishop
Microsoft and Amazon are the tech giants of the Pacific Northwest. These two companies shape Seattle technology, and Todd Bishop has been writing about them for over a decade. Todd is the co-founder of GeekWire, an online media company focused on technology in the Pacific Northwest. We talk about the past and present of Microsoft and Amazon, what it means for an engineering company to be good or evil, and what it’s like to be a software journalist.
#214
Mar 4, 2016 · 47 min
Socket.IO and Realtime Applications with Guillermo Rauch
Socket.io enables realtime bidirectional communication. But what does “realtime” actually mean? Today’s guest is Guillermo Rauch, the creator of Socket.IO, a widely used technology for client server communication. We discuss the nature of real-time apps like Uber and Google Docs, and talk about the API and usage of Socket.IO.
#213
Mar 3, 2016 · 1 hr 1 min
Bridge Foundry with Sarah Allen
Technology careers are not as accessible to certain demographics, such as women. Sarah Allen is working to change that through education and outreach. Sarah Allen created RailsBridge and Bridge Foundry, a pair of organizations working to make technology more accessible to people who are underrepresented in tech. RailsBridge workshops are a fun and free way to get started with Ruby, Rails or other technologies. RailsBridge was so successful that Sarah created Bridge Foundry, which has an even wider variety of free workshops, from Clojure to Go to Mobile. This is an inspirational episode of Software Engineering Daily, and is a great learning opportunity for anyone interested in building a community.
#211
Mar 1, 2016 · 54 min
Continuous Delivery and Test Automation with Flo Motlik
Continuous integration and deployment are important tools for modern software development. With continuous integration and deployment, individual engineers can push code without waiting to synchronize with the rest of the team on a big software release. Today on Software Engineering Daily, Flo Motlik, the CTO of Codeship, joins us to discuss continuous integration, dev ops, and microservices. In full disclosure, Codeship is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily, but we would be doing this interview whether or not that was the case, because Flo has a lot to say about software engineering. In this show, we get into conversations and case studies of how software teams take continuous deployment from theory into practice.
#210
Feb 29, 2016 · 57 min
Data Science at Monsanto with Tim Williamson
Monsanto is a company that is known for its chemical and biological engineering. It is less well known for its data science and software engineering teams. Tim Williamson is a data scientist at Monsanto, and on today’s show he talked about how he and a small group of engineers at Monsanto dramatically shifted the culture around data science-driven genetic engineering. In this episode, Tim explains how useful graph databases are for modeling the genetic lineages, and talks about how Monsanto manages simulations and experiments on their genomics software pipeline. Tim also talks about how just a few engineers can create a cultural shift within a large company like Monsanto using the leverage allowed by software.
#209
Feb 27, 2016 · 52 min
Distributed Systems with Leslie Lamport
This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a definition: a distributed system is a multiprocessor system in which the time required for interprocess communication is large compared to the time for events within a single processor–in other words, it takes longer for interprocess communication than it does for a process to look at its own memory. Alternatively, a distributed system is one in which processors communicate by sending messages. Leslie goes on to talk about how he became interested in distributed systems, and describes the story behind his paper about the Paxos algorithm. The goal of Paxos is to maintain consensus in an environment with unexpected faults (otherwise known as Byzantine faults). After the discussion of Paxos, Jeff asks Leslie about his recent talk “Thinking for Programmers,” which emphasizes the benefit of having a specification prior to writing actual code. “Specification” can mean a variety of things, but predicates and next-state relationships provide a mathematical rigor that is well-suited to distributed and concurrent systems. The conversation concludes with Jeff asking Leslie about how a programmer can build the mental resolve to work through a difficult problem.
#207
Feb 26, 2016 · 53 min
Computational Neuroscience with Jeremy Freeman
Apache Spark is replacing MATLAB in the domain of computational neuroscience. The constraints of running MATLAB on a single machine can’t support the demands of neuroscience, which has huge collections of images and time-series data sets. Jeremy Freeman is a computational neuroscientist who is adopting Apache Spark to be able to analyze these giant data sets that do not fit on a single machine. But Apache Spark was not designed with neuroscience in mind. For this reason, Jeremy has helped to build several libraries on top of Spark. Thunder is a library for standard, distributed representation of data. Lightning is an API for reproducible web visualizations. These abstractions sit on top of Spark, and add a layer of usability. As it turns out, solving these problems for neuroscience have produced tools that are useful in a variety of other domains. In our discussion with Jeremy Freeman, we talk about Apache Spark, neuroscience, and the technological and cultural problems faced by traditional academic research.
#205
Feb 25, 2016 · 59 min
Applying Software Research to Industry with Andy Ko
University research produces numerous papers about software engineering. Unfortunately, many of the problems explored by these software engineering researchers have no actual application. These papers fall into The Black Hole of Software Engineering Research. Andy Ko is an associate professor at the University of Washington. When he worked as a CTO of AnswerDash, he experimented with some of the software engineering research coming out of academia and industry. Today on Software Engineering Daily, we discuss Andy’s results. Our conversation spans the topics of education, big companies, and startups.

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